The Demo­c­ra­tic Repub­lic of Congo has finally received a loan from the Inter­na­tional Mon­e­tary Fund. The loan will also make the DRC eli­gi­ble for debt relief from the IMF.

What stood in the way of receiv­ing the loan was the Congo’s plans to do infra­struc­ture for cop­per deals with China. The IMF said those deals would only put Congo deeper in debt. Mean­while, the DRC has been nego­ti­at­ing with India on sim­i­lar trades which the IMF said they would monitor.

From Reuters, writer Les­ley Wroughton describes the loan fur­ther and the nego­ti­a­tions that led to it.

The debt relief, which will cut the DRC’s over­all stock of pub­lic and publicly-guaranteed debt, will be reduced to about $4 bil­lion from $13 bil­lion, a senior IMF offi­cial said.

At Friday’s dollar-SDR exchange rate, the loan is worth about $551.45 million.

The IMF-backed eco­nomic pro­gram aims to gen­er­ate eco­nomic growth, reduce infla­tion to sin­gle dig­its, strengthen pub­lic finan­cial man­age­ment and accel­er­ate reforms in the DRC, which is emerg­ing from a 1998–2003 war, the Fund said.

The loan was approved after the IMF pres­sured the DRC to rene­go­ti­ate an infrastructure-for-minerals agree­ment with China, which the Fund argued would have increased Congo’s debt burden.

The size of the deal was cut in August to $6 bil­lion from an orig­i­nal plan of $9 bil­lion, and Con­golese gov­ern­ment guar­an­tees con­nected with the com­mer­cial min­ing aspect of the agree­ment were taken off the table.

The Fund delayed approval of the loan and the debt relief pend­ing a revi­sion of the China deal.

IMF mis­sion chief to DRC, Brian Ames, said with­out debt relief the coun­try “is not sus­tain­able from a fis­cal or from a debt per­spec­tive, China notwithstanding.”

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